Israel Carries Out 2nd Round of Airstrikes in Syria

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Israeli military mounted a second round of airstrikes in Syria on Friday morning, killing all of the passengers traveling in a vehicle and intensifying the most serious conflict in the area in months.

The Israeli military said it was pursuing militants who had fired rockets at Israeli-controlled areas on Thursday, saying in a statement that the air force had “targeted part of the terror cell responsible for the rocket fire” but providing no further information.

Sana, the official Syrian news agency, said an Israeli drone strike hit a civilian vehicle on Friday near a marketplace in Al Koum, a village in the Quneitra area on the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights.

Israel repeated its claim that Iran was ultimately to blame for the rocket fire, and sought to use the attack as further evidence that the United States Congress should reject the nuclear deal reached last month between world powers and Iran.

Specifically, Israeli officials said an Iranian commander had supervised militants of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad and accused the organization of firing four rockets toward the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights and Upper Galilee on Thursday. There were no casualties in that attack.

The Israeli news media reported that an airstrike had hit a military vehicle less than 10 miles from the Israeli-controlled frontier. Israel’s Channel 2 said four Islamic Jihad activists were killed, along with a Syrian Army officer and an Iranian officer, who were in the vehicle.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group in Britain, offered a similar account, saying that the vehicle was carrying five pro-government militia fighters who belonged to a group known as the National Defense Forces. The monitoring group gave no further information.

In statements to the Palestinian news media, Daoud Shihab, the chief spokesman for Islamic Jihad, denied any involvement in the rocket attack. Mr. Shihab said the militant wing of Islamic Jihad operated “inside occupied Palestine” — a reference to Israel and the Palestinian territories. There was no immediate comment from Iranian officials.

After the airstrike, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had “no intention of escalating events, but our policy remains unchanged.”

“Those countries that hasten to embrace Iran must realize that it was an Iranian commander who provided protection and direction for the cell that shot at Israel,” he said.

Dore Gold, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said in a telephone interview that “it is untenable that Iran can argue it is in a diplomatic process in the West, while its forces continue to wage wars of subversion and terror across the Middle East.”

“Iran derives legitimacy from the nuclear agreement,” Mr. Gold said. “There’s a problem here: almost like an inconsistency between Iran’s stated position of being a diplomatic partner and the continuing warfare.”

After the rocket fire on Thursday, Israeli aircraft conducted retaliatory strikes against more than a dozen Syrian military posts, weapons storage sites and artillery pieces, the Israeli news media reported. The Syrian Observatory said Friday that two soldiers were killed in those strikes.

An Israeli military official said that the rocket fire on Thursday had been “clearly intentional” and not errant fire that happened to come across Israeli-held territory.

In a formal protest lodged with the world powers that negotiated the nuclear agreement, including the United States, Israeli officials said they had “credible information” that the attack was carried out by Islamic Jihad operatives.

The protest message, known as a démarche, said that the attack was “facilitated and directed” by Saeed Izaadhi, who it described as an Iranian operative “who heads the Palestinian unit” of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran.